The Endless Redemption of Mike Tyson

The cycle continues: He bares his flaws, but he doesn't apologize

Would you please forgive Mike Tyson already? The former heavyweight champion-turned-bro-comedy sight gag has been trying to gain your forgiveness for decades and yet, for some reason, he can't seem to get it no matter how many times he asks for it.

Then again, Tyson, like the naughty kid he's been characterized since he went from street thug to the world champion, rarely actually apologizes for his actions, yet still expects redemption at every juncture. His latest attempt at image rehabilitation comes via The Undisputed Truth, a Spike Lee-directed one man show airing November 16 on HBO. (A book of the same name co-written with Larry Sloman is out now.)

In it, Tyson appears alone on an empty stage, a white suit telegraphing his innocence. The trailer and promotional materials for the special promise that the champ will lay bare all his flaws, fears, and hopes, yet, it's hard to imagine Tyson actually saying he's sorry for anything since he's proven unable to do do it several times over his long career.

Just watch this painfully awkward footage of Tyson struggling to apologize to Evander Holyfield on Oprah in 2009. Tyson vamps for minutes at a time, rambles on about how much he admired his opponent before biting a piece of his ear off in 1997, yet never manages to simply say "I'm sorry." In this and other cringe-worthy interviews, you can see how much the man craves acceptance, yet can't seem to bring himself to do the minimum to achieve it.

Redemption has been central to the Tyson narrative since he burst onto the international scene as a 20-year-old fighter ably throwing punches with, as he once boasted, "murderous intention" in the mid-1980s. As Esquire's own Tom Junod noted in 1999, "from the moment he began making his name as a fighter, Tyson has functioned as a national redemption fantasy--the barbarian civilizing himself first by accepting the stewardship of the sainted Cus D'Amato, then by reading Tolstoy and Marx and Hemingway in prison while serving three years for rape--and each time the fantasy has been frustrated, the fantasists have responded by declaring him fit only for punishment, an unregenerate barbarian after all."

What makes that cycle all the more depressing are the glimpses of the vulnerability beneath Tyson's iron exterior, the guilt that comes through with each ruinous act he has committed in public and in private. Not for nothing did the South African boxing writer Donald McRae once call Tyson "a sensitive soul snared in an ogre's body": You can almost feel the good guy in him being knocked out time again by the bad guy.

In his Esquire profile, Junod goes a long way to describe how Tyson—then in prison for violating his parole—was on a path of self-defined redemption, "a story of his own." Throughout the piece, Tyson's then-wife, Monica Turner, a doctor and sister of former RNC head Michael Steele, was cast as a firm, steady presence in her husband's once chaotic, now coherent life. To read about her then, Turner was the one person in Tyson's life who cared, someone who came along after years of flawed mentors, managers, and minders messed him up. Only she could provide Tyson, more boy than man then, with the stability he needed to put his checkered past behind him.

It was not to be. Since that time, Tyson and Turner split (he's now married to Kiki Tyson, co-writer and producer of The Undisputed Truth) and he's had yet more public stumbles, culminating in his confession in Undisputed Truth that he was a cocaine addict during long stretches of his box career.

Tyson now speaks in the measured language of recovery and seems—one hopes—to be on a true road to, yes, redemption. In a video portrait for Esquire's 80th anniversary issue he spoke of deciding to "be accountable for my actions," something most 47-year-old men decide to be years, if not decades, sooner and well before having children. (Tyson has eight.) But despite his age, Tyson has always had a lost little boy quality about him, which is no wonder, given how dreadful his childhood sounds in this excerpt from Undisputed Truth published by New York Magazine last month. But even as he's paid lip service to his own maturation, you can see the boy Tyson once was in the man he is now. His self pity and need for affirmation was evident as far back as 1982 when a 15-year-old Tyson was caught on video between bouts at the National Junior Olympics in Colorado sobbing into the arms of his trainer, Teddy Atlas: "It's all right now… I'm Mike Tyson… Everybody likes me, yes, everybody likes me… I've come a long way, I'm a fighter now, I'm Mike Tyson."

He still has a long way to go. Here, a look back at five of Tyson's attempts at redemption since punching his way into the American consciousness.

1988: Mike Tyson and Robin Givens Interviewed by Barbara Walters, and Givens says Tyson never hit her ("He shakes, he pushes, he swings," she tells Walters). A year later, boxer-turned-author José Torres quotes Tyson telling him about the best punch he ever threw: "It was when I fought Robin… she really offended me and I went bam and she flew backwards, hitting every wall in the apartment."

1995: After serving partial term for raping beauty contestant Desiree Washington in 1992, Tyson is released from prison and gives a series of interviews in which he depicts himself as penitent. Now a devout Muslim, he proudly shows off his new tattoos: the face of Mao Zedong and Arthur Ashe. "I'm not good. I'm not bad. I'm just trying to survive in this world," he tells The Source. Two years later, he loses his boxing license after biting off a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear in June 1997.

1999: While serving two years for assault related to a fender bender, Tyson poses for an Esquire cover story. In the decade following his release, there are a number of accusations, lawsuits, and investigations into everything from his alleged assault of two women in a Washington restaurant, a beating he delivered two fans at a Brooklyn hotel, and the supposed neglect of two pet ferrets at his Las Vegas home.

2009: Tyson stars in Tyson a documentary directed by James Toback, who'd previously cast him in a small role as himself in Black and White. In a review, The New York Times's A.O. Scott called the boxer "a self-pitying, self-justifying man who squandered his talent and good fortune and caused much more hurt than his brutal profession required." That same year, Tyson appeared in a bit of self-parody as himself in The Hangover.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.